On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 04:17 +0100, Ananda Samaddar wrote:
> After one of my usual bored web browsing sessions I came across these items:
>
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
> http://applications.linux.com/comments.pl?sid=38263&cid=97469
>
> Adobe have opened the source code to their Action Script virtual
> machine (the Tamarin project) and the main developer of swfdec states
> in the second link (if it's him) that Flash 8 Video support would be
> easy to add to swfdec. What does everyone else think of this? I
> personally find it shocking that a proprietary software product has
> become a de facto web standard. Surely a FLOSS Flash player would go
> some way to remedying such a reliance on a proprietary product? Am I
> clutching at straws? We already have Gnash and swfdec but they are as
> of yet not fully Flash 9 compatible. Will the Tamarin project be of
> any use to them?
The Tamarin news are quite old, are they not? Anway, this is what the
Gnash project leader had to say about Tamarin being any use to Gnash:
"Very little, actually. Their released code will help Mozilla,
which had a poor JavaScript engine, but not Gnash much. Tamarin
is not a Flash player, it's not even close. It's probably about
10% of the code required for a Flash player."
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/index.php?p=177 (I also think this
was discussed on their mailing list. Search the archives).
I'm quite positive about the development speed of both Gnash and swfdec.
Keep in mind that Gnash is a young project, and swfdec was dormant for a
while. It's only recently someone has picked it up again.
What we can do as users, is to use this software, file good bug reports,
and be encourage the developers. Hacking Flash is supposedly not even
hard, according to the swfdec developer,
http://www.advogato.org/person/company/diary.html?start=37
Oh, and swfdec0.4 in all it's YouTubey glory is in unstable now.
--
Cheers,
Sven Arvidsson
http://www.whiz.se
PGP Key ID 760BDD22
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